Rare Nuclear Test Films Saved, Declassified, and Uploaded to YouTube

Megalith

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A weapons physicist and his team has rescued and restored a plethora of deteriorating nuclear-test films and have uploaded them for everyone to enjoy. Around 750 have been declassified, and there is plenty more to come, as 6,500 films (out of an estimated 10,000) have been found. Check out the playlist for over 60 nuclear explosions.

The U.S. conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962, with multiple cameras capturing each event at around 2,400 frames per second. But in the decades since, around 10,000 of these films sat idle, scattered across the country in high-security vaults. Not only were they gathering dust, the film material itself was slowly decomposing, bringing the data they contained to the brink of being lost forever. For the past five years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) weapon physicist Greg Spriggs and a crack team of film experts, archivists and software developers have been on a mission to hunt down, scan, reanalyze and declassify these decomposing films.
 
Look up the test site area in Nevada on Google Earth....staggering. We already had WW3!

You can tell the difference between above and below ground tests.
 
Watching those, I keep hearing The Terminator theme song.

Awesome find man. Some of them are very fascinating.
 
Folks should read "The Atomic Times" by Michael Harris.

He did his post war national service on the US pacific testing islands. He and his buddies had to stand on these islands on parade with their backs to the blasts. They were not allowed to wear goggles (only officers were allowed) or close and shield their eyes until the blast happened. That was scary enough...until the test where the bomber pilot got the drop site wrong and dropped the bomb in front of them...

The authorities were making it all up as they went along.
 
Old test footage like this always reminds me of Oppenheimer's response to the first tests.

Not quite the look of accomplishment.
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Folks should read "The Atomic Times" by Michael Harris.

He did his post war national service on the US pacific testing islands. He and his buddies had to stand on these islands on parade with their backs to the blasts. They were not allowed to wear goggles (only officers were allowed) or close and shield their eyes until the blast happened. That was scary enough...until the test where the bomber pilot got the drop site wrong and dropped the bomb in front of them...

The authorities were making it all up as they went along.
You can always count on the military to take something simple and fuck it up.

As an aside, two of the best books on the development of the A-bomb and later the H-bomb are 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' and 'Dark Sun' by Richard Rhodes. Rhodes won a Pulitzer for the first one.
 
Possibly the coolest job in the world. Traveling around to save history.
In my opinion that is.
 
Look up the test site area in Nevada on Google Earth....staggering. We already had WW3!

You can tell the difference between above and below ground tests.


A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

 


#Too long didn't watch version: Nuclear Fracking worked, but the gas was too radioactive to sell commercially. /So they lit a flare stack, and let the radioactive gass burn until the well was finally exhausted.

Or the time they detonated two nuclear devices in a salt dome in Mississippi.

 
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so how does nuclear winter actually happen if there are already have been over 2000 bombs exploded?
 
so how does nuclear winter actually happen if there are already have been over 2000 bombs exploded?

Not all were above ground. After a while they realised that above ground tests were not very clever. From about the early/mid 60's onward they went underground.
 
so how does nuclear winter actually happen if there are already have been over 2000 bombs exploded?

Maybe from the dust clouds created by leveled cities. The fact that nuclear weapons were created in the first place pretty much put human civilization on a quick crash course towards a catastrophic reset. Inevitably with the technology spreading to rogue third world nations, someone will set a few off in the future and all hell will break loose. Then again it may not even take a third world country to set it off, the US/China/Russia might bring it to us sooner than later. Either way we're all fucked.
 
so how does nuclear winter actually happen if there are already have been over 2000 bombs exploded?

It's a misconception. Nuclear winter is the description of multiple firestorms burning at one time across the globe caused by nuclear blasts. Nuclear detonations don't necessarily create a firestorm, it depends on the weather conditions of that day. A firestorm could be created by non-nuclear bomb methods. However the term is coined because it was originally thought that nuclear blasts had a higher chance of creating a firestorm and if a firestorm was created due to a nuclear blast then the resulting soot that gets ejected into the upper atmosphere would be radioactive.
 
so how does nuclear winter actually happen if there are already have been over 2000 bombs exploded?

Probably because they weren't all detonated at the same time spaced out evenly.
 
It's a misconception. Nuclear winter is the description of multiple firestorms burning at one time across the globe caused by nuclear blasts. Nuclear detonations don't necessarily create a firestorm, it depends on the weather conditions of that day. A firestorm could be created by non-nuclear bomb methods. However the term is coined because it was originally thought that nuclear blasts had a higher chance of creating a firestorm and if a firestorm was created due to a nuclear blast then the resulting soot that gets ejected into the upper atmosphere would be radioactive.

No it's not. It's when the nuclear blasts fills the atmosphere with dust blocking out the sun for extended periods of time.
 
No it's not. It's when the nuclear blasts fills the atmosphere with dust blocking out the sun for extended periods of time.

A nuclear blast generally doesn't do that. It's the resulting firestorm, if created, that fills the atmosphere. A firestorm is a self-burning fire that's kept burning by the atmospheric conditions, continually generating soot.

Almost all nuclear blasts don't actually create this effect.
 
so how does nuclear winter actually happen if there are already have been over 2000 bombs exploded?

Yes but not in a matter of decades. Nuclear Winter occurs when you have multitudes of Nuclear detonations within a very short time period (same day or two), the radio active debris is shot into the atmosphere initially. Then comes the firestorm which gives way to world wide fires. These large fires actually create their own weather system & create more fires ect. engulfing everything that can burn and throwing trillions of tons of smoke & chemicals into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun and cooling the planet.
 
I've always had a weird fascination with atomic explosions, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that to be quite honest. There's just something, a beauty if you will (you know, eye of the beholder kinda thing), in watching it happen so this will absolutely be something I'd consider a treasure trove of goodies to view. I know it's pretty much the most destructive thing mankind has yet created and I also know that we in the U.S. are the only country to have ever used such weapons on our own kind but there is still this beauty to such detonations that defy words sometimes.

The U.S. Government really could have demoed the device(s) on small non-populated islands and that would more than likely have been more than enough to scare the Japanese government into surrendering almost immediately after seeing the whole island basically disintegrated and flattened to a sheet of glass, but Truman capitulated to the military brass in the room when pressed for a solution on how to actually utilize the devices and thus Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened, sadly. Yes I realize it did bring a quick end to "The War in the Pacific" (in which my Dad participated, actually) but even so, I'll bet that Truman regretted it after the fact pretty severely and Oppenheimer wasn't alone there.

Still, it's awesome to see this footage and I always knew there's a lot more of it out there than has ever been released in the past. Whenever new documentaries about atomic weapons and their history appear I'm always game to watch so this stuff will be great to check out.

DOH... someone already posted that video, my mistake, edited the post and deleted it. :D
 
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I've always had a weird fascination with atomic explosions, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that to be quite honest. There's just something, a beauty if you will (you know, eye of the beholder kinda thing), in watching it happen so this will absolutely be something I'd consider a treasure trove of goodies to view. I know it's pretty much the most destructive thing mankind has yet created and I also know that we in the U.S. are the only country to have ever used such weapons on our own kind but there is still this beauty to such detonations that defy words sometimes.

I've always felt the same way. You just can't not see the awe in it. Imagine how the people in the 40's felt.
 
I've always felt the same way. You just can't not see the awe in it. Imagine how the people in the 40's felt.

Yeah im sure those Japanese were in Awe, right before vaporization...I sure hope we smarten up and figure out fusion reactors soon enough. Then no need for nukes to proliferate.
 
Yeah im sure those Japanese were in Awe, right before vaporization...I sure hope we smarten up and figure out fusion reactors soon enough. Then no need for nukes to proliferate.

Imagine all the Japanese that would have been in awe as they saw a United States mainland invasion. Especially the ones who threw themselves off cliffs with their children in hand for fear that the Americans would eat them as warned by the Japanese government. As bad as it was, it was necessary to end the war.

There will always be nuclear weapons because it makes one hell of a good deterrent. Mutually Assured Destruction.
 
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Sure keep so
Imagine all the Japanese that would have been in awe of a United States mainland invasion. Especially the ones who threw themselves off cliffs with their children in hand for fear that the Americans would eat them as warned by the Japanese government. As bad as it was, it was necessary to end the war.

There will always be nuclear weapons because it makes one hell of a good deterrent. Mutually Assured Destruction.

But really we should be figuring out how to live together peacefully on this planet as humans, not americans, or russians, or indians etc...Nationalism is stupid and small minded. The constant threat of destruction from all angles...that just builds more war machines. Just look at North Korea
 
Sure keep so


But really we should be figuring out how to live together peacefully on this planet as humans, not americans, or russians, or indians etc...Nationalism is stupid and small minded. The constant threat of destruction from all angles...that just builds more war machines. Just look at North Korea

Are you new here? Humans have been fighting over dirt for as long as our species has existed. Its not going to stop any time soon. Also, North Korea is just sabre rattling. They aren't going to do anything because of China. Although Mikhail Gorbachev did say that from his perspective it looks like the world is getting its self ready for war. We'll see.
 
Nope not new here, in fact looks like we joined around the same time! Thats exactly what im saying, were small minded not looking at the big picture even though we have the ability to look out into our corner of the galaxy and realize there are a shit ton of things that could kill us unintentionally. Id focus on that, not who's pile of dirt this is. Too possesive I suppose? im not sure what its rooted in, but more nukes isnt the answer
 
I sure hope we smarten up and figure out fusion reactors soon enough.

No, not fusion as that's fucking dangerous, what we need are aka LFTR aka "lifter" which is by basically every measure that matters actually safe from start to finish (aside from the Uranium-233 component (not to be confused with Uranium-238 which is used for making Plutonium-239 for nuclear weapons as well as in current technology nuclear power reactors).

There are a bunch of documentaries about Thorium-based reactors and they really are almost foolproof - they operate at low pressures (so the chance of an explosion because of some high pressure containment facility having a breech is basically impossible), their "fuel" can be evacuated quickly because of the design of the reactor core (it uses a "freeze plug" which is literally a plug of ice that in the event of a power failure or something similar would melt quickly and open which allows the liquid/molten salt to drain into a passively cool containment tank already deep under the entire facility, and many other aspects that compared to traditional nuclear power reactors are just better and safer.

Yeah, I've spent too much time researching these things over the years and it still baffles me why they're not in use because they work, can produce power in great quantities, use materials that readily abundant all over the world (meaning not one specific source), and there aren't many negatives at all except for the already in place nuclear infrastructure we already have which doesn't want any competition and to maintain the status quo which is the biggest problem facing Thorium research.

This is a case where the old saying "If you build a better mousetrap..." comes to mind because Thorium based reactors and power plants are superior in most every respect over the much maligned nuclear infrastructure we've had since the 1950s but because of that status quo and the entrenchment of that very infrastructure and the people making mad fucking crazy profits off it well, you can obviously see why it's resistant to any and all possible change.

More general info at:

http://energyfromthorium.com/
 
But really we should be figuring out how to live together peacefully on this planet as humans, not americans, or russians, or indians etc...Nationalism is stupid and small minded. The constant threat of destruction from all angles...that just builds more war machines. Just look at North Korea
The hippy ideals you're advocating are naive and self-destructive, and result in a race to the bottom. Cooperation is good, but pure altruism and selflessness is a weakness that can't be afforded, and those that practice it (few do, they usually just give it lip service) are walked all over and abused.

Its like the chocolates theory in the altruism gene. Imagine that you live in a society where resources are represented by chocolate candies, and the more chocolate candies you have, the better your quality of life and the more offspring you have. If you live in a small community of like-minded individuals all with the same goals and basically a homogeneous isolated society, being altruistic can benefit yourself indirectly. For example, all it takes is one neighbor to take way too much chocolate from those around her as a selfish glutton, and she thus has far more children, but in a small society of somewhat related individuals where that may be a sister or cousin or aunt, you are still passing your genes on to future generations and so it benefits you. However, if you were to continue this practice in a modern multi-cultural globalist society of perfect strangers, then what previously worked for your group is self-destructive and genocidal, as we are seeing in Eurabia right now.

So while altruism is healthy, it can't be taken to an extreme, or you get walked all over. Likewise, selfishness taken to an extreme also doesn't work, because you need to be able to cooperate with others in order to achieve anything on a grand scale. So that balance is to cooperate with like-minded people that share a culture and way of life and beliefs that are near you for mutual benefit to secure resources in your mutual self-interest.... and that is called a nation. So Nationalism is a balance between selfishness and selflessness very similar to team sports, where you have to work together as a team to achieve victory for yourself. This competition and "social Darwinism" also tends to advance humanity, as weaker cultures are outcompeted.

And remember that just like in the chocolates theory, even if you somehow managed to get 90% of people to become passive cuckolds, it only takes the 10% to band together as a unit to exert their will on the others, and the same applies to the overly selfish antifa jerkoffs and the like that you see burning American flags and push for anarchy and lawlessness breeds only weakness. History has shown this happen time and time again, and people that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Luckily, many are seeing the failed experiment of multiculturalism and open borders and accepting the benefits of a nation state, as seen in the US, UK, and France, with others sure to follow.
 
The hippy ideals you're advocating are naive and self-destructive, and result in a race to the bottom. Cooperation is good, but pure altruism and selflessness is a weakness that can't be afforded, and those that practice it (few do, they usually just give it lip service) are walked all over and abused.

Its like the chocolates theory in the altruism gene. Imagine that you live in a society where resources are represented by chocolate candies, and the more chocolate candies you have, the better your quality of life and the more offspring you have. If you live in a small community of like-minded individuals all with the same goals and basically a homogeneous isolated society, being altruistic can benefit yourself indirectly. For example, all it takes is one neighbor to take way too much chocolate from those around her as a selfish glutton, and she thus has far more children, but in a small society of somewhat related individuals where that may be a sister or cousin or aunt, you are still passing your genes on to future generations and so it benefits you. However, if you were to continue this practice in a modern multi-cultural globalist society of perfect strangers, then what previously worked for your group is self-destructive and genocidal, as we are seeing in Eurabia right now.

So while altruism is healthy, it can't be taken to an extreme, or you get walked all over. Likewise, selfishness taken to an extreme also doesn't work, because you need to be able to cooperate with others in order to achieve anything on a grand scale. So that balance is to cooperate with like-minded people that share a culture and way of life and beliefs that are near you for mutual benefit to secure resources in your mutual self-interest.... and that is called a nation. So Nationalism is a balance between selfishness and selflessness very similar to team sports, where you have to work together as a team to achieve victory for yourself. This competition and "social Darwinism" also tends to advance humanity, as weaker cultures are outcompeted.

And remember that just like in the chocolates theory, even if you somehow managed to get 90% of people to become passive cuckolds, it only takes the 10% to band together as a unit to exert their will on the others, and the same applies to the overly selfish antifa jerkoffs and the like that you see burning American flags and push for anarchy and lawlessness breeds only weakness. History has shown this happen time and time again, and people that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Damnit! It just makes sense. Well said!.
 
Hey I like chocolates! Nobody is talking about sitting around the camp fire singing kumbayaa. But I am speaking to humanity growing up and realizing that the Nuclear race only ends in destruction. Turning our "attention" towards space will ensure growth and prosperity and could help to ensure our survival as a species should something terrible come our way. I think you chocolates theory is a little over simplified but a good thought nonetheless. Im not envisioning a future a la Demolition Man, but would like to avoid Mad Max / Fallout. Lets go for Star Trek, everyone loves that shit
 
Sure keep so


But really we should be figuring out how to live together peacefully on this planet as humans, not americans, or russians, or indians etc...Nationalism is stupid and small minded. The constant threat of destruction from all angles...that just builds more war machines. Just look at North Korea

never going to happen, it's not in our nature as animals to do that.. i mean hell we don't even do it on a community level let alone entire countries.. it's just how our brains are wired and until there's a legitimate threat to our entire human race and the planet that forces us to work together there's no reason to.
 
When I see all those explosions, I can't help but think how many wars and conflicts and American lives could have been saved if we just USED some of those bombs.

I know it's a horrible thought, but that is what I think.
 
When I see all those explosions, I can't help but think how many wars and conflicts and American lives could have been saved if we just USED some of those bombs.

I know it's a horrible thought, but that is what I think.

It makes you think how different things could have been if the US would have just nuked the USSR, and China out of existence before they developed their own nukes.

Whenever people give the US shit I like to remind folks that there was a couple year period where the US could have chosen to end every life on the face of the Earth if we wanted to - Yet we didn't. Would those in charge in Russia and China at the time made the same benevolent choice if the roles were reversed? I'm confident that if Stalin were in the same position that Truman was he would have nuked the US and called it a day.
 
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